Discovery Earth Live: Arctas

Mike Obland: A Plane With a View

Juneau, Alaska, April 20, 2008 -- Today may have been the most scenic flight I have had on the King Air since taking this job last June. We started our transit back to Virginia and flew from Barrow to Fairbanks and on to Juneau in two flights.

Almost all of the crew met at 7:30 a.m. in the lobby of the King Eider for one last breakfast in Barrow together. A number of people were in the habit of having breakfast at Sam and Lee’s every morning. Chris had become so much of a regular that he didn’t even require a waitress; he would just go up to the kitchen and tell the cook what he was having that day. We were wondering if the owners were going to give him a key so that he could open the place up for them in the morning! Anyway, with Sam and Lee’s the only restaurant in Barrow that I had not yet visited, I decided to go along. It was a very good meal, as most of our meals in Barrow have been.

Most of my gear was packed last night, so when we got back to the hotel, I just had to put a few last-minute items in my bag, upload some data and check my email. I checked out of the hotel, and we drove our gear down to the hangar. Ray and I did the preflight for the instrument and made sure all the gear that we needed was onboard. After tightly packing luggage and gear for the four crew members who would be transiting back with the plane (Rick, Mike, Dale and myself), Rick, Mike and I went to church.

After church, we were expecting to basically just say our goodbyes, load onto the plane and take off. Unfortunately, getting jet fuel in Barrow on a Sunday morning can sometimes be problematic, and we were forced to wait for a few hours as Dale and P.J. called everyone they could to try and find fuel. In the meantime, we played many rounds of really bad pool at the hangar. With all the thawing and freezing in the Arctic, building foundations tend to be very warped. A consequence of this is that the pool table is not exactly level, creating some interesting shots.

We finally lifted off at 1:15 p.m. and put Barrow behind us. We landed in Fairbanks to refuel and grabbed some quick snacks for lunch, and then we were on our way.

Up until that point, the scenery was about the same as it had been: hazy with little visibility of the Alaskan country. South of Fairbanks, though, the air started getting much clearer, and we finally had amazing views of southern Alaska: mountain peaks as far as you could see, being carved out by gigantic glaciers. All four of us had our cameras out and were taking pictures. Mike was calling out the names of peaks and glaciers that we were flying over. Rick even flew almost exactly over the peak of the second-highest mountain in North America, at over 19,500 feet, Canada’s Mount Logan. Very impressive!

Our approach into Juneau was amazing, too. Juneau is situated between towering mountain peaks and right on an inlet from the ocean, and the airport is right in the middle of all that. We were lucky to fly in here on a clear-weather day. Dale had contacts with the local Army National Guard unit, and they graciously allowed us to park our airplane in their hangar overnight and use one of their vans to drive around town. We checked into a local hotel and went to the downtown area. We watched the sun go down behind the mountains, and then had some phenomenal food at a local eatery on the water. After a relaxing time at the restaurant, we went back to the hotel, where I uploaded today’s data and crashed into bed.

If you love to travel and see new places and things, this is a great job.

Photo: Mike Wusk

Mike Obland: Packing Up

Barrow, Alaska, April 19, 2008 -- Ray is flying on our last ARCTAS science mission today. Mike referred to today’s flight as the "money maker," because we will be doing so much coordination with the other airplanes. I walked down to the hangar with a bit of difficulty, as I was fighting 40-plus mile-per-hour wind gusts that were pushing me around. Fortunately, the temperature was above zero for once, so it was not that cold out.

We had some time before the flight would leave in the morning, so Ray and I started packing up our crates of equipment for shipping back to Virginia on Monday. We went through the hangar building and gathered up the rest of our equipment that was lying out, packed it all and cataloged it so that we know where to find it in a few weeks when it arrives at Langley Research Center.

Rick, Mike and Ray took off for their afternoon flight. They accomplished quite a bit, coordinating with the DOE Convair and NOAA P-3, and doing a CALIPSO run northwest of Barrow and passes over the ARM NSA site. In the meantime, Internet access was down at the hangar, so I went back to my hotel room to monitor the flight from there and work on some writing and packing, as we will probably start heading for home tomorrow.

The flight went well; the crew handled all the real-time flight changes and coordination smoothly. After the plane was back in the hangar and everyone was finished with their post-flight tasks, we all met in the hangar offices to go over the final logistics for the trip back home. We will be leaving tomorrow with our mission successfully completed. Rick, Mike, Dale and I will be leaving Barrow on the King Air for about a three-day transit home. Dale, being the crew chief, rides with the plane on long rides like this in case something mechanical should go wrong. I am flying home on the King Air because Ray flew up to Barrow on it, so that we can try to keep our flight times even. Ed, Scottie and Ray will be flying home commercially in the next few days.

We had our last dinner in Barrow at Osaka’s, where the sushi was again excellent. I’m getting excited to be heading back to warmer climates tomorrow!

Mike Obland: Hanging Out in Barrow

Barrow, Alaska, April 18, 2008 -- Today was our first day off since last Friday. It has been a long week, especially with the busy trip we had down to Fairbanks. I think everyone really needed today to rest up and get some energy back.

I wanted to use today to do last-minute tourist tasks before leaving Barrow. After sleeping in a bit, Ray and I drove around the town taking pictures to remember the place by. We stopped in at the Laundromat and picked up a few Christmas gifts and souvenirs for friends and family. We also stopped by the AC grocery store, because for some reason they were having a crazy clearance sale on cologne, and the prices were too good to pass up. Of course, when I got back to the hotel, I opened up the container and found out that the bottle was loosely sealed and had leaked about a quarter of the cologne. So, you get what you pay for, but it was still a good deal.

Ray and I next went to visit the cultural heritage center. They had nice exhibits about the history of the North Slope Borough, and about the history of the native people. The exhibit about how they used to survive in such an inhospitable environment was interesting as well. They even had a life-sized model of a bowhead whale in the lobby.

We had a nice conversation with a woman who works there, sharing what we are doing and listening to her stories about life in Barrow. The people here seem very concerned about the changes to their environment, and several people have specifically mentioned all the haze and pollution that is coming their way. They have been appreciative of the work we are doing.

After Ray and I returned to the hotel, we met up with the other members of the team. One thing we all wanted to do before leaving the frigid confines of Barrow was to take a few fun pictures of us decked out in our shorts and Hawaiian shirts. After a little coaxing, we all agreed and changed clothes. We drove around to a few "tourist" places in Barrow, such as the "top of the world" sign. I’m sure we’ll be laughing about those pictures for years to come.

We were all pretty cold after taking those pictures, and were generously greeted back at the hangar with a home-cooked Philippine meal by one of the hangar employees, P.J., and his wife, Melva. P.J. has been very helpful with moving, servicing, and fueling our plane the entire time we have been in Barrow. The meal was delicious; we appreciated P.J, and Melva’s hospitality.

Stuffed from dinner, we all spent the evening doing separate things. I went back to the hotel to start packing my suitcases for the trip home and to get some sleep. We have one more research flight tomorrow.

Photo: Mike Obland

Mike Obland: A Near-Miss of a Missed Approach

Barrow, Alaska, April 17, 2008 -- Another typical day today. We had a flight planned for later in the morning, so I started the day by working on our data backups, writing all of our data to DVD and trying to catch up from being in Fairbanks. Unfortunately, the Internet was down throughout town again. This seems to occur every week or so. Something happens, and the entire town loses Internet connection, which stops me from uploading data. It seems that back home I could at least go to a bookstore, coffee shop or library to get Internet, but not here.

Another typical day, another typical research flight. It is a testament to the professionalism of everyone involved when research flights like this start to just be routine. Research in all forms is not easy, and not predictable, and I have a lot of respect for others in NASA, such as those who work with human space flight or sending spacecraft to Mars, who do much harder work than us and have done it so well that it has become commonplace, barely earning a mention on the evening news. It is a wonder that those missions work at all, much less become routine!

It was my turn to fly today, and I joined Rick and Mike on a flight east to Deadhorse, which is near Prudhoe Bay and the start of the Alaskan pipeline. We coordinated measurements with the NASA DC-8, which was flying over Deadhorse on its way north toward the North Pole. They flew to within 45 miles of the pole, which is as far as you can go because the North Pole is actually in Russian airspace. That would be neat to see; having that kind of range in your airplane has its advantages, even if their flights are MUCH longer than ours. I guess I’ll just look at John’s pictures.

We coordinated with the DC-8 by flying over it as the crew did a "missed approach" maneuver at the Deadhorse airport. This is the same thing that happens if you are on a commercial airline and the pilot is coming into an airport and does not have enough visibility to land safely. He then pulls up, goes around and may try the landing again. For the in-situ measuring planes, like the DC-8 and P-3s that we’ve been working with, this is a standard procedure for coming down to a low altitude, sampling air along the way. It is interesting to see from the ground, because you have a huge DC-8 buzzing not very high overhead. It is also hard to take pictures of them unless you know exactly when they are coming. Chris and I both have been teased by the guys for missing these photo opportunities on this campaign!

After the DC-8 coordination, we turned west and did a CALIPSO satellite run northwest of Barrow, with the same desolate views of sea ice as far as we can see. I’m trying to take in the views as much as possible, because this may be my last research flight over the Arctic Ocean, and who knows when I’ll get this view again? We took fascinating data of smoke and a deck of cirrus clouds below the plane. Cirrus are wispy clouds that are usually higher than the plane, so it was rare to be able to measure their properties from above and will be very helpful in verifying CALIPSO results.

After our successful flight, we all went over to Arctic Pizza for Mark’s last dinner in Barrow, as he is leaving tomorrow for Wichita, Kansas, to work with another NASA plane being modified there. Mike has also been craving a Hawaiian pizza for a while, so Arctic Pizza was the choice. While we were waiting for our meal, John called Ray on his cell phone to let us know that the DC-8 (which John was on) was returning from the North Pole and would be doing a missed approach over Barrow. Rick, Ray and I set off for the end of the runway just down the street with cameras in hand. We were not going to miss this opportunity! Sure enough, we saw a plane coming in on a low approach and we started snapping pictures. As it came closer, we realized it was the Alaska Airlines evening flight into Barrow. Just minutes after that, the DC-8 came about 200 feet off the ground, roaring overhead. We took a few good pictures, which were worth the frozen, painful fingers that we received for being out in the cold wind so long.

The mission is winding down. Tomorrow is a hard down day, followed by perhaps our last research flight on Saturday, and possibly starting for home on Sunday or Monday.

Mike Obland: Refueling in Nome

Barrow, Alaska, April 15, 2008 -- Back to the frigid north. Rick, Mike, Ray and I left Fairbanks at about 9:45 a.m. on the start of a long, roundabout trip back to Barrow. The plan was to take data along the NASA DC-8’s flight path before Ray and Mike left this afternoon. They were doing a pentagon pattern counterclockwise around most of Alaska, and we would run over a few of their legs in the opposite direction on our way up to Barrow. We went west from Fairbanks, and stopped to refuel in Nome after a 3.4 hour flight. The flight was longer than expected due to the 130-mile-per-hour headwinds. Rick even commented at one point that if we had any more headwinds, we’d be flying backwards.

As remote as Barrow seems to me, Nome did not feel too far behind. Apparently it is as isolated as Barrow, in that everything needs to be brought in by air or sea. We landed at the airport, which had a shorter runway than Barrow that was mostly covered with snow. The taxiways were solid ice, and we could feel the plane slipping and sliding around. With all the snow it was hard to tell the difference between taxiway and field! Our primary plan in Nome was to fuel the airplane as quickly as possible so that we would take off in time for the CALIPSO run this afternoon, and if we could find some lunch that would be great, too. Fortunately, the two guys helping us at the airport were very friendly and helpful. One guy fueled our plane while the other guy ran Mike and Ray into town so that they could grab us some sandwiches without having to wait for a taxi. We thanked them and gave them some NASA calendars and stickers that Mike had on hand. After changing into our poopie suits for the afternoon over-water flight, we were on our way in only about an hour after landing.

We headed out of Nome and relayed the really interesting information we were seeing on dust and smoke layers below us to the pilots of the DC-8, and passed by them at some point as we went north and they went south. We picked up the CALIPSO track and took some amazing data of what may have been Asian dust and smoke. The flight was again rather long, 4.3 hours, and we were all glad to arrive back in Barrow around 6:30 p.m. We were just beat after a long day. We all headed back to our hotel rooms to unpack and have some dinner. Ray and I started analyzing, archiving and uploading the data from our two flights today. We finished the night by relaxing with the whole crew and some other local pilots who told us stories about life as a pilot in Alaska. One pilot has lived up here most of his life, and was telling us about the time when his seaplane was taking off and hit a wave, breaking his floats and causing them to sink. The Coast Guard had to rescue him from the frigid waters, at which point he was unconscious with a core temperature of less than 90 degrees F! It makes me thankful for our exposure suits, as uncomfortable as they may be to wear!

We have another science flight with the NASA DC-8 and CALIPSO tomorrow, and we are starting to talk about when to head back to Virginia. The next few days will bring maybe our last few ARCTAS science flights and a trip home!

Photos: Mike Obland

Mike Obland: A Clear Day for Aerosol Tracking

Fairbanks, Alaska, April 15, 2008 -- Today was a long day. It officially started at about 6:20 a.m. when Rick, Mike, Dale, Ray and I left the airport to head to the hangar. We had to move our airplane out of the hangar to fuel it for today’s flight, and then we put it back in to keep the instrument warm. Hangar coordination has been complicated, because of the number of planes being kept in there. The NOAA P-3 was first in the hangar, and our much smaller King Air was placed next to it. The Convair aircraft that we have been flying frequently with us in Barrow was in front. It had to be pulled out first before we could go. All of this had to be done early in the morning so that each plane could prepare for its flight later in the morning.

While Dale was dealing with fueling the plane, Ray and I went into the hangar building, where most of the ARCTAS scientists are set up, and worked on our usual tasks: uploading and disseminating data and going over today’s flight plan. I took today’s flight, because it would be a longer flight, and Ray has been doing most of those, so it was my turn. He used the time on the ground to work on some improvements to our analysis code, moving us closer to being able to just hit a button in our software and have the computer perform all the data analysis steps autonomously.

The flight for today was coordinated with the NASA and NOAA P-3s early in the flight as we headed west from Fairbanks. Those two planes were flying in near formation for parts of the flight, and we were trying to scout out interesting aerosol layers for them to sample directly. Today had the best visibility that I have seen on any of our flights in Alaska so far. We were relaying our observations of the cloud and haze situation to the pilots on the other aircraft, and then down to scientists on the ground who were adjusting their flight plans moment-by-moment. Even one of our maintenance guys who is still in Barrow, Mark, was helping out. Apparently, one of the science teams could not reach one of their colleagues who was taking ground measurements in Barrow, so Chris called Mark to get the weather and sky visibility reports from him.

After working with the P-3s, we turned to intercept a CALIPSO track for the last part of a more than five-hour flight. Chris, Rick and Mike were working on tomorrow’s flight plan before we even touched down. Ray started analyzing the data as he, John and I went to an ARCTAS science team meeting to hear about what is going on logistically and scientifically with the other airplanes. With the campaign coming to a close, there was some discussion about planning for the last few flights and for packing up and shipping everything back to the lower 48 states. The time up here sure has seemed to go by quickly. Actually, at this point, with all the days that we have been working in a row, it is hard to keep track of the days. I have to keep checking calendars to see what day of the week it is.

We finished the day with another group dinner, this time at a Korean restaurant that happened to be in the basement of a bowling alley, so we had to eat there just to say that we could say that we did. The food was excellent in my opinion, and there was a lot of it, especially when they forgot Chris’ order and gave us a few free plates of shrimp and dumplings as an apology. We walked out of there stuffed and went back to John’s hotel to hang out a bit longer before saying our goodbyes. I still have a little bit of analysis to do before packing my bags and getting to bed after the long day. We are heading back to Barrow tomorrow and it will be another long, two-flight day. I need some sleep!

Photo: Mike Obland

Mike Obland: Meet and Greet in Fairbanks

Fairbanks, Alaska, April 13, 2008 -- Media day! John picked Ray and me up for breakfast in the morning, and we drove to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for the media briefing being put on by the scientists in charge of the ARCTAS campaign. Members of the local news media were there to listen to a description of. and ask questions about, the ARCTAS campaign. Even though I work on this campaign and the data on a daily basis, it is good to hear the "bigger picture" being explained so clearly.

Immediately after the briefing, John, Ray and I traveled back to the Fairbanks airport to the hangar where the King Air, NOAA P-3 NASA P-3, and the NASA DC-8 were stationed. Rich and Chris were busy planning tomorrow’s flight, and John had to provide tours of his lidar instrument on the DC-8, so that left Ray and me to give tours of our instrument. We had a number of different groups come by, from college English students to graduate students in atmospheric studies, to congressional staffers to scientists working on other instruments. It was fun to finally meet some of the other people involved with this campaign -- the scientists that we will be analyzing data with and the pilots that we hear on the radio when we are in flight. When the tours of our airplane slowed down, we were able to take tours of the NOAA P-3 and NASA DC-8. The campaign experiences of the researchers on these planes are much different than ours. Instead of just having one instrument with one researcher onboard, they might have a dozen or more instruments with dozens of researchers onboard -- quite a bit different than our one instrument and one or two researchers!

After the tours were finished, most everyone involved with the ARCTAS campaign went to the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska for a reception. It gave us a chance to socialize and meet some of the other team members outside a work environment. Plus, we were able to explore the museum and its exhibits. I especially enjoyed the stuffed brown bear, polar bear and wolves. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that we will be able to get some pictures of a polar bear in the wild around Barrow (from a distance, of course!).

After the museum, a good amount of the Langley "family" went out for a nice dinner at Pike’s Landing, a restaurant that offered us a view of the sun setting over a nearby river. With the fresh snow from last night, it was a beautiful scene. Tonight is a bit of a farewell dinner, because Rich is leaving tomorrow. He has been working hard on the flight planning in Fairbanks for the past few weeks, so hopefully he will get some much-needed time off with his family in Virginia. Typically on a field mission like this, we’ll switch people in and out to spread out the work and make sure no one gets burnt out from working too much. This mission is a bit different in that we are using roughly the same team from start to finish. One advantage of this is that it gives our engineers back home, Dave and Tony, time to spend on other projects rather than coming up here to fly with the instrument. That is one fun part about this job: a lot of the time you don’t know what task you will be working on day to day. You just have to be flexible and work on whatever is most important to the team’s goals at the moment. For example, we just decided tonight that we are going to stay in Fairbanks for another night so that we can fly with the NASA and NOAA P-3 airplanes tomorrow. And what are we doing the next day? We’ll find out tomorrow night, I’m sure.

Photo: Mike Obland

Mike Obland: A Winter Break

Fairbanks, Alaska, April 13, 2008 -- It looks like we're taking a little break from Barrow for a few days. We flew down to Fairbanks today so that we can participate in Media Day tomorrow, which is a chance for local reporters to come tour our airplanes, talk to the people involved in ARCTAS, and learn about what we do. Because all the other ARCTAS planes are based in Fairbanks, we came down to join them.

The morning started out like usual. We were set to fly out around 11:30 a.m., depending on the morning fog, which gave a few of us time to attend a local church service. The walk back to the hangar from the church takes only about 10 minutes or so, but the wind was so brutal that I’m not sure I could have stayed outside much longer. The actual temperature was down around minus 20 degrees F to start with, and adding to that a steady wind over 10 miles per hour makes for an unpleasant morning. Any exposed skin just starts to hurt after a few minutes. This does not seem to bother the locals, though, some of whom were outside playing basketball in this weather. To them, I suppose this seems like a heat wave compared with the rest of the winter!

Back at the hangar, the plane was out on the tarmac waiting to be fueled. The fog was not a factor, because we had enough visibility to take off. The plan was for Rick, Mike, Ray and me to do a CALIPSO underflight in coordination with the NASA P-3 on our way to Fairbanks. We lifted off around noon, ascended to our cruise altitude of 28,000 feet, did a quick run over the DOE NSA site, and then headed southwest toward the CALIPSO track. There was quite a bit of coordination with the ground on this flight, as the P-3 scientists wanted periodic updates on the cloud situation that we were measuring below us. The weather was not cooperating and most of the CALIPSO track was covered with clouds, which makes for poor CALIPSO comparisons. If there are clouds above our airplane, we have no way of detecting them, even though CALIPSO will see them because it is taking measurements from space. Our measurements in that case will be very different from CALIPSO's, even though we are measuring the same region at the same time. It helped to have both Ray and I on this flight, so that I could handle the instrument while he handled the communications with the ground and the other aircraft.

After a long flight, we finally made it into Fairbanks and were thankful for the change of scenery. It was good to see mountains, trees and even people again! It has been a couple of weeks since we have seen stoplights or fast-food restaurants or driven on roads that were clear of snow. We pulled up to the hangar where the NASA DC-8 and NOAA P-3 were parked, and where the NASA P-3 had pulled up after landing a few minutes before us. We were greeted by a crowd of other scientists from the ARCTAS campaign, including our Langley teammates, John and Rich. It was good to see these guys after a couple of weeks on the road, and we got reconnected over dinner at a very tasty local restaurant, joined by other friends from Langley who have different instruments in the ARCTAS campaign. Not only did we have good food and good company, but the temperature was about 50 degrees warmer than what we were used to in Barrow. It almost seemed like a vacation away from winter, other than the several inches of snow that was predicted for tomorrow. I guess we won’t get away from winter while we are here, but at least we can enjoy the new environment for a few days.

Photo: Mike Obland

Mike Obland: Cold, Smoke and Mexican Food

Barrow, Alaska, April 12, 2008 -- Wow! It's cold up here! At 3:30 p.m. on a nice, clear, sunny day, the temperature being reported online was minus 9 degrees F, and minus 21 degrees with wind chill from only 6 mph of wind. I was working at the hangar while the guys were up on a science flight and I took a short lunch break back at the hotel. I walked back there, which is about a quarter of a mile, without a face mask, and hopefully will not make that mistake again! I couldn’t have been outside for more than 10 minutes, but my face felt like it had been exposed for hours.

We are back to business as usual, with Rick, Mike, and Ray doing a flight that includes a CALIPSO underflight coordinated with the NASA DC-8 aircraft and some measurements of Siberian forest fire smoke with the NOAA P-3. The data today were really fascinating. Not only were we likely seeing ice clouds, water clouds, and the usual Arctic haze, but we seemed to be picking up layers of smoke. That is perhaps the primary advantage of our instrument: being able to infer what we are measuring in the air and where it is located in real time based on the data that we are collecting. It is amazing to see the difference in the atmosphere from day-to-day. That is why predicting and modeling the atmosphere is so difficult … How do you model something that changes minute-by-minute and mile-by-mile accurately enough to predict how it will respond 10 years from now? Hopefully this campaign will help answer questions like that.

When the guys landed, Ray dropped off the data with me and I immediately started analyzing it. We went over how the instrument behaved for him and uploaded as much analyzed data as we could before everyone was ready to head to dinner. Tonight was a special night because Chris is leaving Barrow tomorrow for Fairbanks. Rich, who has been attending the multitude of planning meetings in Fairbanks with the other aircraft scientists, is heading back home next week, so Chris will go down to Fairbanks to take over for him. Chris chose to have his last dinner in Barrow at Pepe’s, the Mexican restaurant. The place is pretty good for being almost as far north from Mexico as you can get! After dinner, we went back to the hotel. Ray and I finished working with the data and starting packing our overnight bags. We are heading to Fairbanks tomorrow.

Photo: Mike Obland

Jennifer Olson: Winding Down

Fairbanks, Alaska, April 16, 2008 -- Today is the last day for flight planning. We are finishing up our work here a little earlier than we had planned. When this was announced, you should have heard the chorus of cell phones that were all immediately used to rebook tickets for home. Everyone here is exhausted, we’re tired of eating out most of the time, and we miss our families and are ready to be home. But I don’t think I’m alone in ultimately being very glad I was here.

The DC-8 is flying a sortie out of Fairbanks today. It’s hitting a range of objectives, from flying low in the boundary layer up north at the land/sea ice boundary, to sampling some aging Asian pollution several kilometers up in the troposphere, to flying low over some lakes on the Seward Peninsula to measure the methane flux out of them. Tomorrow, the DC-8 will take its last science flight, and the flight plan calls for it to head straight to Prudhoe Bay (near Barrow) and then to the North Pole (or as close as we can get, since the Russians claim the air space directly over the pole). That flight will attempt to sample some European pollution that has entered the polar region, reminiscent of Arctic haze.

I didn’t realize until too late that there was the opportunity for theory team members to go on some of these flights, when seats are available on the DC-8. I’m wondering if I should have tried to get one for myself on the North Pole flight, simply so I could say I had been there. I’d love to look out of the window and see the Arctic ice sheet below me. But that flight is clocked to last for a little more than eight hours and I’m simply not a fan of flying. It would have been nice to see the instrument guys at work taking the data. Oh well. Next time, maybe.

Despite the fact that I was sick for several days in the middle of this trip (not enough to stop me from working, but just enough to make me feel slightly miserable), I've enjoyed being here. I’ve mentioned before that although I’ve been involved in analyzing data for atmospheric chemistry field campaigns for more years than I care to discuss, this is the first time I’ve actually been in the field. Before now, I’ve had young children at home that I wasn’t willing to leave for such a long period, and I was able to work that caveat into my career. Invariably, however, the scientists I work with would look at me with what I can only call near-pity and tell me "Oh, you really need to experience a field campaign; You really should go." Now that my children are older and I’m able to spend the time here, I have to say,that I understand why a field campaign is a valuable experience.

I suspected the intensity and focus that this kind of campaign would demand, but I underestimated the rush that such intensity brings. For me, as someone on the theory team, my days have been almost excruciatingly routine, with 10 a.m. flight planning meetings that usually stretch until 1 or 2 p.m., and science team meetings at 5 p.m. most days. It’s definitely not the day-to-day activities that bring on the rush.

About 20 of us had dinner last night at a little Korean restaurant underneath a bowling alley (I think the location was the pull), and the conversation turned to stories from past campaigns over the last couple of decades. There’s a whole culture in our field campaign community – a history of past experiences, of personalities, of stories I could never share here, of near-misses and of new findings. It’s a close camaraderie within an interesting mix of people – a mix of people that are diverse enough that I can’t find a single common thread between them all other than science.

And there, I think, is the key to the rush. For most people here that I’ve met, science is not so much their "work" as it is simply integrated into their lives. It’s exciting to be out here as a part of discovering new information -- the data that we’re collecting will be used for years to refine our understanding of what is going on in the Arctic. But it’s also exciting to be part of this community. We’re all in complete agreement that there’s not much more important work to be done than learning about the impacts of climate change. As a community of researchers, it’s a powerful group.

Photo: Jennifer Olson